Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

gious groups. (To my knowledge, none of the contemporary
loci of ethnic conflict or domination have generated
the formal prohibitions on intermarriage that characterized
the overtly racist regimes, but ordinarily one spouse or the
other must convert.) If ethnoreligious differences are less
rigid than ethnoracial ones, however, they may be more
durable. In an incisive comparison of conflict in South Africa
and Northern Ireland, the sociologist Hamish Dickie-
Clark predicted accurately in 1976 that the formal racial
divide in South Africa would be easier to overcome than
the sectarian split in Ulster. He based his prognostication
on the belief that “racist claims are open to rational and
empirical refutation, whereas the claims made by sectarian
religion are so deeply imbedded in the matrix of faith and
other-worldly authority that they are not similarly open to
logic and observation.” 10 Although it takes much more than
rational persuasion to overcome racism, the fact that its
foundations are subject to empirical falsification does make
it more fragile than the incontrovertible and unquestioning
faith demanded by sectarian or fundamentalist religion.
Along with the dissemination of the truth about human
physical differences, the struggle against racism also requires
that stigmatized groups have enforceable civil rights,
political empowerment in proportion to their numbers,
and equal opportunity in education and employment
(which may require special efforts to compensate for disadvantages
inherited from the past). If persisting racial prejudices
and inequalities make the complete separation of race
and state counterproductive, the first line of defense against
militant sectarianism would seem to be a total separation
of church and state. The high wall that the United States
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